Essay: THE SILENT GENERATION REVISITED

Gertrude Stein notwithstanding, there has been only one truly “lost generation” this century. That is the generation of the 1950s: the American men and women, now in their 30s, who graduated from college in the Eisenhower era—the so-called “Silent Generation.” A member of that age group, TIME Associate Editor Gerald Clarke, 32, reflects on the collective experience of his contemporaries:

To be in your 30s is, by popular definition, to be in the middle—the middle of your career, the middle of your marriage, the middle of your life. Medicine has not yet been able to nudge upward the biblical allotment of threescore years and ten, and we are already halfway there. But we are in the middle in another sense as well. We stand between the two angry lines of what has become a war of the generations. The middle in any war is seldom safe ground, but when we look at today’s angry, frustrated youth and their equally angry, frustrated parents, the middle—what Journalist Renata Adler, 31, calls the “radical middle”—is where we would elect to be.

It is in fact where we have always been. The term Silent Generation may have been unflattering, but it was not inaccurate. By the standards of today’s aware youth, we were, with few exceptions, still, quiet and serenely uninvolved. Interested primarily in ourselves and our own destinies, we tended to be bored by politics and self-removed from social issues. In the ’50s, America seemed both workable and working. It allowed us the luxury of growing up in peace and security: Unlike those who preceded or those who followed us, we were not expected to fight or die for our country. The grievances of poverty, race and inequality were no less valid than they are today, but we were largely unaware of them. And so, for most of us they did not exist. Hypocritical? Yes. Smug? That too —insufferably so. But then so was the country. If the decade of the ’50s had the suffocating “smell of the middle class,” as Gloria Steinem, 34, says with distaste, then it was an odor that most Americans seemed to like.

Our aloofness stemmed from an early skepticism. As youngsters during World War II, we collected paper, stomped on tin cans and weeded victory gardens to help the heroic Russians and defeat the hated Nazis and Japs. Before most of us were in our teens, we were taught that the Germans (no longer Nazis) and the Japanese (no longer Japs) were our allies and the once heroic Russians our enemies. Small wonder that in our college years we learned to be wary of ideologies or political passions. Political involvement, as Joe McCarthy showed us too, could bring disgrace in middle age. His lesson did not necessarily make us cowards—many college students openly denounced McCarthy—but it did teach us the value of prudence. We were constitutional questioners, pragmatists to the bone, and today many of us still are.

We were incapable of hero worship. Those we most admired, in fact, were not real heroes but the anti-heroes of fiction or film: the Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises or the Humphrey Bogart of Casablanca. Begin a scene from that movie, and almost any film fan of our generation can finish it with appropriate gestures and flourishes. (“What brought you here?” Claude Rains, the good guy-bad guy Vichy captain asks Bogart. “My health. I came for the waters.” “What waters? We’re in the desert.” Bogie shrugs. “I was misinformed.”) As Journalist David Halberstam, 36, puts it: “We admired people who fought the good fight against odds—and kept at it.” We did not care so much what the good fight was, so long as it was waged with effortless style and nonchalance. While we could be embarrassingly sentimental, we were, paradoxically, distressed at open emotion. For us, coolness was all. Like Holden Caulfield, the confused but knowing teen-age protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye—the novel that became the decade’s literary touchstone—we detested anything that we felt was phony.

We prided ourselves on being excellent critics, even of ourselves, as if we had a third eye looking in rather than out. Skeptical vision is a quality of the good journalist—and our generation has produced an extraordinary number of good journalists

but it is usually fatal to the novelist or poet,

who must have conviction in order to create. Our outstanding artists of prose and poetry can be counted quite literally on the fingers of one hand. Even the best of them seem uncomfortable with the major theses of life and death. Their concerns are more with language and style, as is the case with John Updike, 38, or with a relatively narrow range of human experience, as is true of Philip Roth, 37. There is no Faulkner, no Hemingway, no Fitzgerald, no O’Neill in our lost generation. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test may well be our Great Gatsby, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad our Desire Under the Elms.

Looking back, it is clear that we were not just a lost generation but a “last generation” as well. We were the last American generation to grow up without television; our fantasies were tied to the radio

the buzz of the Green Hornet and the exotic

adventures of Terry and the Pirates. We also read,

and who knows?—we may be the last generation

in this TV-enwrapped country to fully savor the written word. Our silence on campus had its price, no doubt, but it also had its rewards, not the least of which was the chance to grow at our own pace and to pursue, with no guilt whatsoever, the totally irrelevant. “If we had the last of the wine, the time when you could construct your own cubicle, then we were lucky,” says television’s Dick Cavett, 33. “I look back now on my college days as a time of fantastic luxury.” Above all, we were the last generation to accept without question—or to pretend to accept—the traditional American values of work, order and patriotism.

Only today, in our 30s, do we know that we were different—fundamentally different. When the generation lines began to form, we discovered, to our own surprise, that we did not automatically side with our parents. The new youth counterculture was scarcely less foreign to us than it was to them, but it did not strike us, as it did them, as hostile or threatening. The reason is simple enough: we had not been so committed to the old values as we had thought. We had rented them rather than bought them, and anything rented can be discarded without a sense of loss.

We are renters still, taking as our own the values of both old and young—and not thoroughly comfortable with either. Many of us now feel quite at ease with pot, rock and permissive sex; many of us reject the youih culture categorically. Most of us, however, occupy the unhappy position of being undecided: we want to enjoy, but deep down in our pre-Spock psyches, we feel we shouldn’t. We puff marijuana at parties when we would be happier with Scotch or gin; we don bell-bottoms when we would rather be in tweeds; we jump into affairs when we would rather be at home in bed—asleep. The visible result often is a compromise: the staid Wall Street lawyer, in vest, rep tie and cuffed trousers in the daytime, who turns Bloomingdale hippie in the evening, donning tie-dyed pants and tank top to weed the garden.

Perhaps our uncertainty is symbolized by the uneasy experience of a New York architect, 31, who lived with his girl friend for a year before marriage. The under-30s never even thought about the arrangement; the over-40s vocally disapproved. Many of his contemporaries, on the other hand, were obviously disturbed but said nothing, uncertain of their own feelings or afraid of being thought square. “The short-hairs and the naked-faces have a hard time being real,” asserts a bearded 27-year-old with amiable contempt. And he is right.

Many of our marriages have not survived the strain of being pulled in two directions. The number of divorces for those in their 30s is alarming, the number of unhappy marriages staggering. Sex is probably the same for us as it is for everyone else past puberty. The difference is that our expectations are now those of the young, while many of our marriages were formed according to the rules of the old. The over-40s may be no happier, but they usually are more resigned or more accepting; the under-30s may be frustrated too, but they at least are not caught in the same tight bind of mixed emotions. Our views on religion are scarcely less confused. Is God dead? Don’t ask us. For the majority of us, religion is merely a word, sometimes honored, sometimes not.

Most of us deny it, sincerely no doubt, but we are envious of the young. We were, after all, so close to having the same freedoms and so near to their new world. We are envious of something else: time and time again it has been the young who have led the way in attacking a war that many of us also believe is wrong. Older and better equipped to protest, more of us should have taken the initiative. No doubt many of us will always regret that we did not. Envious of them? Yes, but at the same time (and in total contradiction) we are also relieved that we are not their age. They have much more freedom than we had, but they also have much more pressure put upon them. Unlike us, they feel the hatred of the old, and they know that they must stand together under the banner of youth. At the same time, their frantic independence often hides a group conformity more deadening than anything we could have conceived in the conforming ’50s. Being young in the ’70s is excruciatingly more difficult than it was in the ’50s.

•Our hearts are half with the young, but they are half with the old as well. We still sympathize, truly sympathize, with the “square” over-40s. Though we bear no scars from the Depression and “the war” —their twin traumas—both are the vivid memories of childhood to us, rather than cold, historical incidents in a textbook. We can understand, as the young cannot, why the older generation is afraid, and more sadly, why it is resentful of those who seem to have everything but gratitude. To both young and old, we are almost invisible. The young often see us as the cop-outs—as the shorthaired, button-down junior exec or the suburban housewife in a station wagon —and many of us are. Our parents and older brothers and sisters often see us as the fellow travelers of the youthful enemy, which many of us are too.

Yet we are ourselves, a disparate group that includes Eldridge Cleaver as well as Neil Armstrong, Tom Hayden as well as Ron Ziegler, Susan Sontag as well as Rod McKuen, Ralph Nader as well as Van Cliburn. Like any generation, we contain contradictions and exceptions, including those, particularly among the blacks, who want to burn and bury the system. But the revolutionaries among us, political or cultural, are a minority; reform, not revolution, is our aim. As a generation, we are distinguished by our lack of anger. Circled by fury, we are the unfurious; surrounded by passion, we are the dispassionate. Most of us by this time have made a commitment to the kind of country we want to live in, and often that commitment is pursued with all the energy and talent we possess. Still, it is a commitment based on reason; we are appalled, all of us, by the automatic reflexes of those younger or older than we are. Detached, observed always by that invisible third eye, we still find it impossible to deliver ourselves completely to slogans and ideologies. Even our rebels, our Jerry Rubins and Abbie Hoffmans, have a sense of irony. Our generation could not have produced a Mark Rudd —dour, humorless, and without even the smallest doubt that he might be wrong.

•

For better or worse, we occupy the middle ground in the war of the generations. “We may be the only ones left in American society who can see what’s great and what’s bull,” says Frank Conroy, 34, the author of Stop-Time. “We have no ax to grind.” We are the only ones who understand both languages, the only ones who can explain the young to the old, the old to the young. Our job, in the end, may be only that of translator, but this may now be the most important job of all. We may not be loud, and our voices may be muted even now. But we are no longer silent—if only because we now have reason to speak.